Have you ever had that moment where you are walking confidently through something, a process you have done a hundred times, until suddenly, something feels… off?
It is like walking into a familiar room, but the lights are off. You know where everything should be, but suddenly, nothing feels quite where it should be, and now you are disoriented.
Now imagine that room isn’t a room, it’s a digital product. And the person feeling lost isn’t you. It is your user. And not just any user. It is the one you didn’t even realise you were excluding.
I call them the invisible user.
Context
A while back, in in one of my previous job, our team launched a new feature. We were proud of it with a clean UI, good flow, and solid testing. And the data looked good… mostly.
But there was this one journey, key to the whole thing, where people kept dropping off halfway through. No errors, no bug reports, just… disappearing.
So, we did what any team does. We brought in users. Watched them go through the flow. And then, this one session stopped us cold.
The problem
A user, who was partially sighted, was trying to complete a task. Everything looked fine to us. But they just paused. Then said, quietly, “I can’t read this.”
We leaned in. The text was there. The button was there. But not to them. The contrast was too low. The labels were too light.
What was clear to us was invisible to them.
We hadn’t thought about contrast. At all. The colours passed the brand check, the UI looked great in the mockups. But in reality? We had designed a product that quite literally excluded people.
Action and resolution
That moment sparked a shift. We did a full accessibility audit. Spoiler, contrast was not the only issue.
We fixed what we could fast. We updated components, added contrast checks to our design system, even built a little Figma plugin to flag dodgy colour combos. It wasn’t glamorous work, but it was necessary.
The takeaway
The thing about the invisible user is, you don’t always hear from them. You just lose them.
If someone cannot use what we have built, it is not just an access issue, it is a visibility issue. We failed to see them, and the product didn’t either.
Good design isn’t just about what we can see. It is about what we are making visible.